


End Times

by quinfish



Category: Dresden Files - Jim Butcher, Supernatural
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, everybody loves and apocalypse, spoilers through Small Favor
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-10-08
Updated: 2012-11-24
Packaged: 2017-11-15 21:40:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 12,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/532067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quinfish/pseuds/quinfish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life isn’t the easiest for Harry Dresden, the only wizard listed in the Chicago yellow pages. But that’s part and parcel for the work he does. He signed up for it.<br/>He did not sign up for the Apocalypse, and he most certainly did not sign up for the Winchesters. But some idiots went and let the Devil out of the Pit, and all that noise woke up something ancient.<br/>And it’s never a friendly something.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So we’re all just going to not do any math that will tell me that these timelines don’t line up. Set after Small Favor and during the fifth season of Supernatural. I haven’t read the books in a while, so we might veer into a bit of an AU, but I’m trying not to let that happen.  
> Rating might get bumped up later. It’s a work in progress, you’ll have to bear with me.

No one has ever made the mistake of thinking me a small man. I’m not a particularly broad person, but I haven’t had many encounters that didn’t involve looking down to maintain almost-eye contact with the other party. Those who don’t risk throwing out their necks just to talk to me and still have all the necessary characteristics to be considered people can be numbered on one hand.

His name is Hendricks. Hendricks wears nice suits and makes a point of killing people when his boss decides he doesn’t like them anymore. It is never a good day when Hendricks is around. It still might not be a good day, but he was not the one who had followed me into McAnally’s on a slow Thursday evening early in August. No, it was someone else who had laughed at the six-foot mark as he’d sprinted past it. 

The stranger stooped just in time to avoid knocking his head against the low doorframe as he wandered in. He took the handful of steps down into the pub slowly, and he kept his shoulders hunched as if to shield himself from the thirteen ceiling fans spaced at random intervals, spinning too lazily for the sweltering heat.

He wasn’t the most shabbily dressed person I’d ever seen, but if you didn’t have the money to shell out, it was just plain hard to dress yourself when you had that much limb going on. I speak from experience. I couldn’t tell if the jaw-length cut of his hair was the result of carelessness and time or an active stylistic decision. He looked uncomfortable in his jeans and faded blue t-shirt, almost vulnerable with his impressively muscled arms bare. I waited a minute to see if I recognized him, but I’d never seen him before in my life.

And that was strange. I may not have had meaningful heart-to-hearts with everyone who would have reason to know about McAnally’s, but I knew damn near all of them by sight. We had ourselves a recluse, then, or a newcomer, or God help us, a tourist, in town for Lollapalooza and interested in taking in the sights.

I watched him look the place over from where I sat eating in one of the thirteen booths, back in a corner and facing the door. He wasn’t entirely ignorant--his eyes swept over the place, darting from fan to fan, pillar to pillar, counting, recognizing the pattern of the decor. Thirteen of everything, spaced randomly, perfect for diffusing the errant energies of hungry (grumpy) wizards. There were a few other people in the pub tonight; Mac, of course, standing behind the bar and saying about as much as he ever did (nothing), a couple of hedge witches and one poor bastard who could smell magic but nothing else. The stranger looked them all over as calmly as he examined the building. When his eyes fell on me, though, a muscle in his striking jaw clenched. He turned quickly and sat at the bar, his back to me.

I instinctively placed one hand on my staff, propped up against the wall next to my booth, and quirked an eyebrow across the bar at Mac. He managed to shrug at me in response without actually moving, listening to the newcomer and fetching him a bottle of ale.

I dropped my hand, but I didn’t stop watching. Shaggy took a sip. Just a sip.

You don’t take just a sip of Mac’s ale, not unless you’ve pissed off the wrong faerie and wound up cursed enough that you can no longer appreciate true artistry. But there he was, sitting at the bar, his hand on the bottle, not drinking. He was pointedly looking at nothing, one long leg jouncing up and down while he waited for...something. 

I was the biggest, baddest magic slinger in town, if you didn’t count the things that popped through from the Nevernever on occasion. McAnally’s was protected under the Accords-- not even the Erlking was allowed to start shit here. Shaggy was a nonentity. But for some reason, every instinct in my body was screaming at me to get the hell out.

I hadn’t survived half the things the world had thrown at me by ignoring that sort of thing. I had a meeting with Murphy in half an hour about some dead bodies that normal channels couldn’t explain. She’d forgive me if I showed up a little early. I threw back the last dregs of my own bottle of ale, grabbed my staff and worked very hard to not look like I was fleeing as I booked it up the stairs and out into the parking lot.

I risked a glance back over my shoulders while I fumbled for my keys. Shaggy wasn’t right on my heels, but he did emerge before I reached the Blue Beetle, which was largely green and white these days. The pastel purple hood was an embarrassing addition after a run-in with a particularly nasty troll out in the suburbs had left the previous red piece crumpled on the road behind a middle school. Made it damn easy to spot in a parking lot, though, and I was just short of trotting toward it now that I knew for sure I was being followed. 

I never made it. My focus on getting to my car, I didn’t notice the man sitting in the driver’s seat of the sleek black Chevy Impala until he was opening the door and slamming it bodily into me. It wasn’t the hardest hit I’d ever taken, but there’s only so much you can do when you don’t see the attack coming. The door’s handle smacked into my diaphragm, forcing my breath out of me as I stumbled back. I didn’t get a chance to have a good look at the guy sliding out of the car before the back of my skull exploded in white hurt.

I heard my staff clatter to the ground before my vision blurred, and I had a moment to notice that my head was definitely going to knock against the door again as I fell before everything went dark.

Not, I’ll admit, my finest performance.

 

It was full dark by the time I swam my way back to throbbing consciousness. As far as waking up in a strange place after being hit in the head, this wasn’t the worst situation I’d ever found myself in. I was tied at the wrists and ankles to a simple wooden chair in a windowless room that smelled of mold, time, and aerosol, but joint stiffness aside I didn’t seem to have sustained any new injuries, and I didn’t think anybody was going to be trying to sell me on Ebay this time around. It looked like I was alone, so there wasn’t even any torture in my immediate future. That was nice. I liked that.

The only light was a very orange work lamp hanging above my head. The pool of illumination ended before it reached the walls, leaving me with no idea how large the room was. It was disorienting, to have no dimensions, no understanding of the space I was in, with my head still reeling. I closed my eyes, forced myself to take slow, even breaths, and took stock of myself.  
The ropes binding me were tight enough to cut off my circulation, and I could feel something lukewarm and sticky in a smear down the right side of my face. Blood, probably. Definitely, on second thought. There was a line of stinging heat above my right eye, where I must have caught the car door on my way down. My palms and elbows were scraped raw from the asphalt. I had no idea what had happened to my staff, my shield bracelet was missing, and the weight of my mother’s pentacle amulet was absent from around my neck.

But whoever had jumped me had left me with my rings, one on each finger. It wasn’t exactly my full arsenal, but at least it was better than nothing. 

There was the soft sound of footsteps, and then I was abruptly damp. I coughed and spluttered and nearly yelped at the sudden burst of cold and opened my eyes to glare at the two men in front of me. Shaggy was holding a silver flask and glaring at who I could only presume was the driver, who was staring quizzically back.

“How many times have you done this before?” Shaggy demanded, less anger in his voice than exasperation. 

“I know how to bless water, Sammy,” was the driver’s response. He looked small next to his companion, but he was by no means a short man, layered with sinewy muscle. His hair was short and gelled up, and his jaw sported several days’ worth of stubble. He was the sort of man who looked like he ought to have scars, but there wasn’t even sign of an old papercut on his fingers as he snatched the flask from Shaggy’s hand. “Did you grab the wrong one? I swear to God, if you just threw my whiskey on this thing I will kick your ass all the way to Sunday.”  
He sniffed the open bottle and, apparently satisfied, splashed me again with its contents.  
I’m not sure what they were expecting, but apparently my glower wasn’t it.

“Am I supposed to be melting now?” I asked, burying the hard edge of my almost-panic with glibness. “I hate to break it to you, but I’m not the Wicked Wizard of the Midwest, that’s not going to work.”

The force of their twin glares was enough to silence me, and I dropped my eyes before I could get pulled into a very much unwanted soulgaze with one of them. The sorts of people who went around snatching wizards out of parking lots were not high on the list of people whose essences I wanted branded permanently into my memory. They quickly returned to muttering AT each other while I examined the floor.

I quickly discovered the source of the aerosol smell. A circle of greater holding unlike anything I’d ever seen in person had been sprayed onto the ground in bright orange. Was that...hell’s bells, was that Enochian? It was the sort of circle that the Wardens only pulled out when they were spooked by something.

Wardens do not spook easily. I swallowed hard. Whoever these people were, they knew some heavy shit. What’s worse, they didn’t seem particularly well trained if they thought splashing a little water on me was going to do a damn thing. Something this big in uneducated hands was a disaster waiting to happen.

“Okay, so, not a demon,” Shaggy murmured. Both he and his companion had turned away, but there wasn’t exactly much in the otherwise empty room to absorb the sound.

“Shapeshifter?” the driver offered, a metallic edge to his voice, and I really needed to think of a name for him now that the car was no longer in sight. 

“No, he was wearing silver.” Shaggy pulled my mother’s amulet out of his jeans pocket, and I glared.

“So what, we got the wrong guy?” Scruffy was starting to sound agitated. Or maybe he always sounded that way. Shaggy just arched an eyebrow at him.

“And how many people in the city of Chicago do you think are seven feet tall and drive a car that messed up? He matches Jo’s description to the letter.”

It was at this point that I felt the need to speak up. The Blue Beetle might not have been the most beautiful of cars, and maybe it didn’t always start on the first go, but that was my car, damn it, and they were insulting it. “And yours is so inconspicuous, yeah?” I bit.

“You didn’t seem to notice her,” Scruffy said, smirking.

“I was a little distracted by the moose following me.”

His expression didn’t change, but something in his eyes seemed to harden. “Try it again, Sammy,” he commanded, never removing his gaze from me. “We’ve got bigger shit to deal with.”

Shaggy looked uncertain for a moment, and then he started chanting. In Latin, it sounded like.

At it’s most harmless, Latin tends to give me a screaming headache. Employed maliciously, it can make a man’s heart explode out of his chest.

I’ve seen the aftermath. It’s not pretty.

My skin started prickling with something that was almost familiar as the words rose around me. Familiar is not always a good thing with magic. Hell, my life being what it is, I’d say it’s rarely worked out in my favor.

I wasn’t particularly interested in seeing the endgame here.So I did something reckless.

Shocking, isn’t it?


	2. Chapter 2

The problem with being so good at fast and dirty, brute force magic, is that when it comes to situations requiring subtlety, I’m about as helpful as a bicycle in Lake Michigan. At the moment, I would have killed for even a fraction of the finesse that other practitioners, even my own apprentice, possessed. But I didn’t have that. I had a couple weeks’ worth of kinetic energy stored in each of my rings, and a very bad idea.

I wouldn’t be Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden without bad ideas. 

I stole a moment to wish I had my shield bracelet or heavy leather duster and all the protective wards I’d woven into it. Then I took deep breath and jerked my right hand back toward myself, as much as I could in the confines of the rope. At the same moment, I released some of the energy in a single ring. The arm of the chair exploded into wooden shrapnel, no small amount of which embedded itself into the unprotected flesh of my leg, shoulder and chest as I toppled backward.  
It was not a pleasant sensation on my already swimming head, and I could already feel warm blood trickling down my side, but I had an arm free. Shaggy and Scruffy swore and started forward to restrain me, but I pressed my hand to the ground and pushed some of my will into the circle they’d so graciously provided for me. It was almost funny the way they bounced off of the invisible wall that snapped into place at my bidding, and I went about undoing the rest of the ropes securing me to the ruins of the chair before standing up.

“I have an office, you know,” I said as I grimaced at the fragments of wood helping my shoulder with a rather convincing hedgehog impression. “And a phone number. If you wanted an appointment, all you had to do was ask.”

Neither of my captors seemed to have a response to that. Shaggy just reached out and pressed a hand against the wall of the circle. The looks on both of their faces suggested they’d never seen anything quite like it before, despite the fact that they’d been the ones to draw the thing in the first place. 

I’d suspected they were ignorant before. Now I knew they were just stupid. The kind of stupid that leads invariably to the Wardens’ chopping block. It was only a matter of time before they blundered their way into breaking one of the laws of magic, if they hadn’t done it already.

I was feeling a little too concussed to be properly sorry for them, though. A swing of my arm and another release of energy from my ring threw them back. They shouted and hit the wall--ah, there it was-- with a dull thump, and then they didn’t move very much at all.

I followed them and rummaged through Shaggy’s pockets in the dark. I’d reclaimed my amulet and my shield bracelet when he groaned and opened his eyes blearily. No time to look for my staff, then.

I found the door and I fled.

 

I was late to my meeting with Murphy. Several hours late. The sort of late where I was dragging myself to the front door of her house just past eleven after walking as convoluted a route as I dared, wobbling the whole way. The house was cute, much like its owner, who answered far more quickly than I was expecting. She was dressed in loose jeans and a plain white tank top, though on a normal night she would have been in bed at this hour. Her hard eyes warned of a scolding, but softened when she got a good look at me.

I wasn’t a pretty sight. I’d snuck a look in a dark window as I’d made my way here. My face was ashen and half-covered with congealed blood. I’d pulled the largest of the chair’s remains from my arm and the meat of my shoulder, which had cost me more blood spilling down my side and the line of my bicep. I hadn’t risked stopping long enough to pull anything from my leg.

“Hiya, Murph,” I said, and even I was worried by how thready my voice was. “Sorry I’m late. There were some bodies you wanted to tell me about?”

“Christ, Harry,” she breathed, ushering me inside. It was no small comfort to feel the wards I’d set up on her threshold at her request close around me as she shut the door. “What the hell happened?”

“Some assholes hit me on the head,” I groaned as I sat at her kitchen table. “And then I blew up the chair I was sitting on.”

She fetched one of the many first aid kits that she kept around the house and began cleaning me up as I explained what happened. She’d cut my shirt to ribbons and was pulling out the smaller splinters in my chest by the time I finished the story. 

“Did they say what they wanted?” she asked, efficient and to the point even now. I shook my head.

“They didn’t even seem to know who I was,” I said wearily. “They were operating based off a description, not my name. And they didn’t know I was a wizard.” I closed my eyes, and I suddenly wanted very, very badly just to be able to sleep. “Whatever information they lacked, they knew enough to take my things and set up a major circle. And there’s no way I didn’t leave some blood behind.”

Murphy’s hands, which had been smooth and gentle even when rage had been clear on her face and in the cool razor of her voice, suddenly faltered as she bandaged me. Mortal or no, Karrin knew her way around magic. She knew how screwed I was. She got it.

But she didn’t say anything about it. “I’ll put out an APB with your descriptions of them first thing in the morning,” was what she did say. Karrin Murphy, practical to the last. And then she just finished patching me up.

She refused to feel sorry for me. I liked that. It was why we worked.

“C’mon, you can sleep in the spare room,” she said, helping me wobble to my feet. “We’ll get this dealt with tomorrow. You need to rest.”

I worried briefly about bleeding on the sheets, but then I was pulling my shoes off and tumbling into the bed and it seemed worth the risk. She smiled at me tightly, brushing my hair away from the butterfly bandage holding together the cut over my eye, and then turned off the lights. A few minutes later, I was unconscious.

 

I woke up with a headache. But more importantly, I woke up alive and in the same place I’d fallen asleep. Shaggy and Scruffy hadn’t followed my blood to Murphy’s house to nab me while I was out, and they hadn’t killed me from a distance, either. This counted as a victory. Even if sitting up set off a drumbeat in my skull and reminded my shoulder that it could scream. I winced and kicked my legs free from the tangled mess I’d made of the blankets in my sleep.

I’d been too out of it to notice exactly how much I’d bled last night in Murphy’s kitchen. Stumbling in and seeing her scrubbing the floor clean of the red stuff, when she usually would have been at work at Special Investigations already, sent a pang of guilt through me. Karrin put up with a lot of shit, being my friend. More than once, her job had been put on the line because of me, and now she was staying home to look after my sorry ass, despite the recent string of deaths that she must surely be itching to see solved.

“I could whip up a spell to do that for you,” I said by way of greeting. She glanced up at me just long enough to roll her eyes and snort indelicately. It was still strange, hearing that sound out of someone with such a cute little nose.

“I’m happy with all of my appliances working, Harry,” she said dryly. “But thanks. Sit down, you lost a lot of blood yesterday.”

I wanted to snipe at her that I’d noticed. I did as she told me instead. My head still felt like a helium balloon that had gotten into a fight with a meat grinder, and I didn’t fancy the thought of falling and hitting it again. I’d been in more than my fair share of rough patches before, but I couldn’t remember a time when things had gone from business as usual to wanting to hide in a dark, cool corner quite so quickly. I should have been investigating a series of grisly deaths, not worrying that my own was approaching.

Murphy plunked a glass of apple juice on the table in front of me and commanded me to drink. Not exactly my beverage of choice, but my head was still swimming and liquid calories are good calories. I guzzled half of it down before pressing the cool, smooth surface of it to my temple.

“So,” I said, heaving a sigh. “We’ve got what can only be a couple of warlocks in town starting shit, and a case that’s been handed over to your corner of the department. I will eat my staff once I get it back if the two aren’t connected. Now’s as good a time as any to fill me in.”

Karrin pressed her lips together and sat down across from me. “We’ve got dry-land drownings,” she said. “Three so far, lungs full of water. No connection between the victims, no pattern to when or where it happens. Just random deaths. You know of anything that could do that?”

I knew of lots of things that could do that. I just couldn’t think of any that would, not if they stopped at just drowning. Most of the shagnasties I knew of that specialized in watery graves usually got a meal out of it.

“Not without more information and research, no,” I said, setting the glass down and rubbing a hand over my face. “I’m going to need all the details you’ve got on the vics and some time in my lab.”

Murphy looked me over, her eyes flinty. She nodded once after a long, considering moment. I knew her well enough to recognize the argument she was having with herself--I wasn’t in the best shape, there were people out there, dangerous people, who had it in for me. She didn’t want to leave me alone. But they had my blood. They could get me any time they wanted, regardless of how many people I was with, and whoever or whatever it was drowning innocent people needed to be stopped. Getting me to my lab was the best shot she had at making that happen.

“I’ll take you home,” she said at last. “We’ll swing by the precinct on the way, get you a copy of the files.”

“My car’s still at Mac’s,” I started. 

“And it can be picked up,” she cut me off. “Later. By someone else. I’m making sure you get home, even if it means knocking you out.”

I’ve got a foot and half and no small amount of muscle on Murphy. I also didn’t stand a chance against her in a fair fight, let alone when I was out near a quart of blood.

She drove me home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Been making some progress on the far end of this, and the positive reaction so far has me a little giddy, so here's the next chapter nice and quick. I'll try to keep updates as fast as possible, but don't expect one a day after this. Sorry.


	3. Chapter 3

There is a reason you think of wizards in robes. We seem to have some ingrained evolutionary need to have our labs underground. And that gets cold. Impossibly cold, when you take into account the fact that we can’t keep a decent heater running to save our lives. The robes help.

In the height of Chicago summer, the subterranean cool of my sub-basement lab was a godsend. My heavy flannel robe remained on its hook upstairs. Because it was just that hot, I didn’t bother replacing the torn, bloodied mess of my shirt, and I lit only just barely enough candles to be able to see.

Stretches of manic research aside,I’d never quite managed to keep the lab clean. With the exception of the corner where I’d planted a perfect bronze circle into the concrete floor and my apprentice’s desk, the place looked vaguely like some drunk college students had had the run of it. Or at least it would to anyone who wasn’t me. It was an organized chaos; there wasn’t anything there that I couldn’t find when I needed it. At the moment, I needed information. Most wizards had some sort of magical encyclopedia. I had Bob. All the information I could possibly need, with bonus lip and perversion.

He didn’t even have a body to have a sex drive with, but there you have it. Magic. It’s weird.

I snapped my fingers in front of the human skull that rested on a pile of worn, tawdry paperbacks on one of my bookshelves. “Wakey wakey,” I said, more brightly than I felt, sitting down with a wince at my workbench. “We’ve got inexplicable deaths to resolve.”

Twin orange lights blinked into existence in the skull’s eye sockets. 

“Shit, Harry,” the air spirit said, managing to whistle despite a distinct lack of lips. I still couldn’t figure that trick out after all the years I’d had the skull in my possession. “What happened to you?”

I looked down at myself. The bandages that Karrin had wrapped me with the previous night were mostly clean, but dark, ugly bruises were already flowering out beyond them. “A chair blew up under me,” I told him. “We got a couple new warlocks in town, had to get creative.”

“Have you considered a safer creative outlet?” he asked archly. “Fire spinning? Bear wrestling? Poking Denarians with a stick?” 

“I don’t do this for fun, you know,” I sighed. Then I redirected. “Work time. We’ve got three dead bodies, lungs full of water. A teenage boy, a thirty year old woman, forty-three year old man. Nowhere near any body of water, nowhere near each other, all killed at different times of day. What’ve you got for me?”

“Any flesh missing from the bodies?” he asked, clicking his teeth together. “Could be a kelpie getting tired of the lake.”

“I thought that, too,” I said. “No dice. No nibbling on any of them.”

“Angry nymph, then?” he offered. “Maybe a disgruntled nix? You haven’t exactly given me much to work with, Harry. I’m good, but I’m not that good.”

“Well that’s all I’ve got,” I muttered, leafing through the files Murphy had printed out for me. “Haven’t seen any of it in person yet. I was going to go to one of the scenes yesterday, but I was a bit busy getting knocked out and tied up in a serious Enochian circle.”

“Woah, woah, Harry,” Bob spluttered. “Enochian? As in angels Enochian? You might have mentioned that a bit earlier.”

“I did say there were warlocks,” I said weakly.

“This changes things,” Bob said, with a gravity that didn’t show up often. “We need to get eyes on those bodies. Yesterday. The shape you’re in, you’ll miss something important. Let me out.”  
I hesitated. And I kept hesitating.

“Harry,” he hissed. “I’m serious. This could be very, very bad. ”

More than once, Bob had used the time I’d given him out of his skull to incite orgies at the University of Chicago. But he’d never been quite like this before. Intense, almost desperate. Definitely frightened.

The noncorporeal, immortal air spirit was afraid. I knew enough to react appropriately.

“Twenty four hours,” I said, forcing my voice to be stern even though I didn’t feel it. “You have twenty four hours to find out as much as you can and report back to me.”

Bob usually left on a smart remark. He was silent this time, light spilling out of the skull and up through the ceiling to find and bodyjack my cat. I sat for a few moments in the cool quiet, letting my eyes drift shut, letting myself be still. My injuries throbbed with every beat of my heart, and in the stillness I could take each hurt and turn it over, take it apart, see what made it different than the others. It didn’t make them hurt any less, but it gave me a better chance of anticipating them.

A deep breath, then I stood. A wave of my hand and a single word of quasi-Latin extinguished the candles, plunging my lab into complete darkness in the last moment before I exited.

There wasn’t really anything I could do until Bob came back with his information. I hated admitting it, but even if I were to go gallivanting off into the streets I wasn’t likely to do a lick of good. There wasn’t much for me to do.

So I made myself a couple sandwiches, sat on the couch, and waited. Mouse, my enormous grey dog, emerged from my bedroom and settled next to my feet, so I added scratching his ears to my worrying and eating. I half expected to drop dead at any moment. I had no idea how much of my blood I’d actually left behind the previous night, but it seemed unlikely that all of it had dried already. Some seriously aggressive unknowns had the single best weapon in the world against me. I couldn’t imagine why they hadn’t used it yet.

Maybe they didn’t know how? Sure, they’d set up the biggest, baddest circle I’d seen since my sort of-apprentice had tried to hold a loup-garou and wound up dead in the process, but they’d reacted as if they’d never seen even the simplest circle activated. There had been chanting, but I’d felt no real push of will as Shaggy had said the words. It had honestly felt more like one of Michael’s prayers than anything actually resembling magic as I understood and worked it.

Not warlocks, then. Maybe. But then what the hell had they grabbed me for?

A quiet knock at the door tore through my thoughts, and I tensed. A second later, I felt my wards stand down, and my half-brother opened the door and sauntered in. 

“Hey Harry,” Thomas said blithely, closing the door behind him. Mouse rose and ran over to him, tail wagging excitedly. “Murph called, told me what happened. Got your car for you.” He tossed the Beetle’s spare key to me before giving Mouse the thorough petting he was asking for. When my dog was satisfied, he wandered back over and reclaimed his spot at my feet. Thomas followed suit, sitting down next to me.

“Angel language, huh?” he asked, not looking at me.

“Angel language,” I confirmed, staring forward.

“They got your blood?”

“They got my blood.”

A moment of companionable silence passed.

“That sucks,” he said at length. “If it makes you feel any better, they tailed me here.”

I blanched and turned to glare at him. “How is that supposed to make me feel better?”

He smirked, though he continued to look straight ahead. “Because I’ve got them tied up in their own car out front for you.”

Don’t tell anyone, but I really love my brother sometimes.

 

It would have been tricky for most people to get Shaggy and Scruffy out of their car and into my apartment. But most people were not a vampire of the White Court or a Warden of the White Council. Bringing my sword cane along just in case helped. My brother and I found ourselves on the receiving end of some powerfully sullen glares, but I put them to sleep with a quick spell and Thomas hauled them both inside. At the same time. It looked easy.

We had the distinct advantage, between my wards and Thomas’s strength, but we tied them to chairs anyway. I was beginning to doubt my earlier assessment of these two as dangerous, but I still wasn’t feeling particularly charitable. Thomas went to inspect their car, to see if he could find my staff or any indication of who the hell these people were, while I stayed inside. The spell I’d used could keep people out anywhere from fifteen minutes to a full night; it wouldn’t do to risk them waking up without anyone to keep an eye on them.

I fetched myself a bottle of Mac’s ale from my icebox, grabbed another for when Thomas returned, and settled back on the couch. I drank, and I watched them. Mouse sat beside me, his ears pricked up and attentive. But there was no growling, no baring of teeth. He’s a good judge of character, Mouse. And he was just curious.

Thomas returned a few minutes later, a little paler than usual, my staff in hand. He tossed it to me at the same moment I volleyed the bottle of ale his direction. He made his catch considerably more gracefully than I made mine, and made easy work of the bottle cap with one thumb.

“Whoever these people are, they mean serious business,” he mused, taking a sip and stepping in front of our guests. He leaned forward to peer first at Shaggy, then at Scruffy’s slackjawed, sleeping face. “They’re drowning in fake IDs and they’ve got a full arsenal hidden in the trunk. Hidden poorly, mind you, but hidden.”

I frowned, rolling a mouthful of ale over my tongue before swallowing. “Any guesses?”

“Hunters, I’d imagine,” he said. “Smart ones. Not smart enough to realize that you’re benign, but smart.”

I huffed a breath. “I’ve saved this city enough times that I think I’ve gone a bit past benign.”

“And how many buildings have you set on fire in the process?”

I shot him a glare, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was instead examining Scruffy, his face thoughtful. His eyes were a little less blue than usual. A little more gray than was comfortable.

“No,” I said firmly. “Bad Thomas.”

“What?” he asked innocently, running his fingertips through the unconscious man’s hair. “I’m hungry. And I like the look of this one.”

“This one hit me with the door of his car and then tied me up,” I said flatly.

“And now we’ve tied him up,” was my brother’s response. “Everything’s fair. Better yet, it’s fun.”

I gave him my best wizardly glare. He’d been on the receiving end of it enough times to no longer be properly impressed, but he sighed and stepped back anyway. 

“How long are they supposed to be out, then?” He asked, flopping down next to me.

“I dunno, didn’t cast the spell with a time frame in mind.” I stood, tapped a finger experimentally against Shaggy’s forehead. I studied him for a reaction.

He woke up, locking his startled eyes with mine.

Before I could look away, we gazed upon each other’s souls.


	4. Chapter 4

Fire. Before anything else, there was fire, and smoke that tasted like blood. I tumbled through a wall of burning to get at the essence of Sam Winchester.

Names echoed in his soul on repeat, some louder and more often than others. Madison showed up often, and Jessica. Dean. Mom. Over and over he called for his mother, and something in the fire murmured quietly back that it wasn’t his fault. Almost as often came the name Azazel, and an accompanying roll of revulsion and remorse.

There were two of him in a simple salt circle inside the fire. One clutched a small, wickedly curved knife wreathed in light and fury in his ash-blackened hands and he struggled to stand, his face screwed up in a raw expression of pain and hate. He was crying. The other wore a white suit, pristine despite the blood that dripped from his hands and onto his double’s face where he held him down with two fingers. The standing figure’s eyes were a shining black straight through, and his face spoke of pity and impatience. 

It was a fight that would go on for a while. There would be no relief, not until it was done and one half of him was stamped out. Just being present to observe his soul told me enough to know the stakes. The Sam that reclaimed his footing with an animal snarl as I watched was hardly a saint. I could smell the death on him, on his blade, could only guess at his body count.

But I shuddered for a world that fell under the cold scrutiny of those black, black eyes.

They turned on me, saw me, looked inside and turned my lungs cold.

And I slammed into my own body, staggered back, gasping. Thomas was at my side in an instant, steadying me. It only took a moment for Sam to start shouting. 

“What the hell did you just do to me?” he demanded, a note of panic to his voice that was far from flattering. He was pale, and leaning as far away from me as possible in his binds.  
Sometimes I wonder what people see when they look inside of me. Seeing what it did to this man, who had so much wrongness inside of him for all of his good, was the sort of thing that made me not want to know. It wasn’t an uncommon reaction, either.

I suppressed a shiver at that thought.

“I didn’t do anything,” I said, my voice tired, a little shaky. “Soulgazing just comes with the wizardly territory. As many mean and nasties as you’ve hunted, you ought to have picked up on something as basic as that by now.”

“We tend not to ask witches many questions before cutting their heads off,” he said tightly, visibly struggling against his restraints now. 

“Warlocks, Winchester,” I corrected, my voice growing sharp in my lingering shock. “If your lot comes into contact with them, it’s because they’ve broken a rule. Generally the first law. That makes them warlocks. Actual respectable witches tend to keep to themselves unless they’re being helpful. You know, the greater good and all that.”

Sam glanced nervously at his companion, who was still asleep, then to Thomas. He was careful to avoid eye contact. A quick learner. My brother regarded him archly, but said nothing. 

“So I’m supposed to believe that you’re one of the good guys, then?” he asked. He must have been shooting for glib, but it came out almost hopeful. 

“You saw me,” I said simply. “Did I look like the bad guy?”

He frowned. “You’re awfully...gray.”

Black eyes flashed in my mind, and I snorted. “Speak for yourself.” 

His shoulders hunched. 

“Alright, look,” I said, heaving a sigh. I seemed to be sighing a lot, lately. “There’s obviously been some kind of misunderstanding here. Do you promise not to hit me in the head or steal my stuff if I untie you?”

“Harry,” Thomas hissed, his voice low and warning. But Mouse decided in that moment to rest his head on Sam’s knee, his tail thumping loudly against the ground. My brother’s eyebrows shot up in surprise, but he nodded.

Sam just looked perplexed, but not so much that he didn’t thank me when I undid the knots around his right wrist.

Part of me expected my hands to come away red.

“So what are you doing in town?” I asked, idly wiping my hands on my still-bare stomach. I hadn’t had time to put on a new shirt for the company. “You know, other than hunting for wizards who have done absolutely nothing to deserve it.”

He coughed and ducked his head as he finished untying himself. “Yeah, sorry about that,” he muttered. “We heard that there were some unnatural deaths going on, and that some guy was claiming to be a wizard, and we just kinda...leapt to some conclusions.”

“Being a wizard,” Thomas corrected for me. “Not claiming. A Warden, even. Big, lawful, enforces-the-rules Warden.”

Sam smiled nervously. It was a good smile. “Sorry,” he said again. “We don’t usually run into friendlies like you.” He paused and glanced at Thomas. “So, you’re a wizard too?”

My brother showed teeth when he smiled. “Not hardly,” he said, and nothing more.

The moment was becoming uncomfortable when my phone started ringing. It was always a surprise when that happened, not because no one had occasion to call me but because the damn things usually couldn’t stay functional for more than a few days at a time. Last I’d checked, it had been busted.

I answered quickly, gruffly. Michael Carpenter, former Knight of the Cross and forever the Fist of God was on the line.

“Harry,” he said, a touch of urgency to his eternally calm and assured voice. “I have an angel here--”

“Shocker,” I muttered, cutting him off. Michael had a whole host of angels guarding his family ever since he’d been injured and laid down Amoracchius. An injury, I couldn’t help reminding myself, that was my fault.

There was a moment of stern silence underneath the static that was always present whenever I used a telephone. I coughed, and Michael knew me well enough to recognize it for the apology is was.

“I have an angel here,” he began again, “who needs you to let down your wards. There’s something important he needs to talk to you about. Now. And he can’t get inside until you do.”

That was the sort of request that I usually laughed at as I shot it down. But, well. It was Michael. I grimaced, then said a quiet word imbued with my will.

The phone went dead as my wards fell. A second later, Scruffy was awake, and a man in a ragged suit and a pale trench coat was standing in the middle of my living room. I jumped.

I didn’t actively dislike angels or anything, but in my limited experience with them, they were cryptic sons of bitches with no regard for the conventions of conversation, popping in and out whenever they wanted to without explanation. This one’s sudden appearance gave me no reason to believe that he would be any different.

He didn’t say anything at first, just circled slowly, absorbing everything. I threw my wards back up, not particularly interested in having any other company. Probably should have done it as soon as the angel arrived, considering how many things wanted me dead and had the capacity to do it. It was sluggish. Probably the blood loss. 

“Cas, where the hell have you been?” Scruffy demanded. “Waste the witch and let’s go.”

“I apologize for Dean,” the angel said at length, his voice lower and scratchier than would have guessed to look at him. “When Michael explained to me who you were, I hoped to prevent any...unpleasantness.”

“Just a little head trauma,” I said. “I’ve had worse.”

At the same moment, Sam and Dean stiffened. “Michael?” they demanded in unison. “Angel Michael?” Dean continued. “Wants-to-possess-me Michael?”

“Michael Carpenter,” the angel corrected. “Human. A man of great faith and love. I thought I might help with the research by going to him. When I told him of your suspicions about the wizard, he corrected me. He told me stories.” He walked toward me, well into my personal space, and stared unblinking into my face. “Harry Dresden’s methods may be questionable at times,” he said, and I did not know the man nearly well enough to be feeling his breath on my cheek as he spoke. “But he is a force of great good.”

“Great. Fantastic, we should all hold hands and sing kumbaya,” Dean growled. “Someone untie me so we can hug it out.”

The angel looked mildly confused, but he waved his hands and the knots undid themselves. 

Dean stood, glaring, and moved as if to step toward me. Thomas put himself in the way, his eyes hard. “If you so much as think about laying a hand on him again,” he said, calm and almost conversational, “I will break you.” It was much more intimidating on a vampire than it would have been from a mortal, even if the recipient didn’t know. Dean faltered.

“Call your freaky boyfriend off, would you?” he growled, glaring at me. But there wasn’t any real animosity to it, and his harsh expression seemed to be as much for Cas, who saw it and stepped away. I didn’t know angels could look sheepish.

“He’s not my boyfriend,” I corrected him, bored, long since used to strangers leaping to the wrong conclusion. Life would have been a hell of a lot easier if I could just tell people that he was my brother. But, well, he was a vampire and there was a bit of a war on. It wouldn’t look good. 

“It’s your fault people assume this,” I said, turning to Thomas. “I hope you know that.” He relaxed some, but didn’t smile. 

And for some reason, Sam laughed. He buried it in his hand after the first peal, but we all turned to look at him curiously.

“Sorry, nothing,” he said, the laughter gone but a smile lingering. 

It really was a nice smile.

I liked it a hell of a lot more than the violence I’d seen in his soul.

 

Dean Winchester was more bluster than follow-through once his brother and their angel calmed him down. I excused myself for a moment to throw a shirt on, and when I returned we all went about explaining ourselves. 

Castiel and the Winchesters were not the folk musicians that the name implied, here to play in the music festival that made my city much too crowded every summer. They were there to investigate the same bodies that Murphy had called me about. They had a fairly simple routine everywhere they went. Find something fishy, track it down, kill it dead. Apparently, it worked quite well most places. Most places didn’t have anyone else to protect them from the things that go bump in the night.

Chicago was not most places. The city had Karrin Murphy heading up Special Investigations. Unofficially now. My fault. But she had the experience, people tended to listen to her or they tended to die or go nuts. As far as I could tell, SI was the only law enforcement agency in the whole of the country that was equipped to handle anything outside the realm of normalcy. It also had me, and my collection of allies, which always seemed to be a bit bigger every time I looked at it. Of course, the same can be said of my list of enemies. It’s not a perfect system. 

The Winchesters had waited to do their homework until they’d actually reached the city, which was why our introduction had been a messy one. I considered holding onto my grudge about that, but Castiel made a rather convincing case for letting it go when he pressed two fingers to my forehead and healed me.

Healed me. Just like that. Apparently that’s something angels can just do. Might have been nice to know that before.

Might have been nice for Michael to know that. I might have shouted a little. Castiel explained, and I’m paraphrasing, that things were a little hectic at the moment, things upstairs weren’t running as smoothly as usual, and it was probably time for him to just be with his family anyway.  
I wasn’t happy, but I let it go. Michael was alive at least, and there were three people who weren’t. We talked shop. The Winchesters had run into something similar a few years ago, the angry ghost of a drowned boy, but they’d ruled that out as soon as they’d arrived in town. We were clueless.

My old plan had been to wait until Bob came back. That plan had not had room in it for people who regularly practiced destroying spirits. Shaky alliance or not, I was not letting a couple of hunters near my best source of information and one of my better friends, though you’ll never hear me admit it. The plan had also come into place when I was full of holes and couldn’t do any of my own investigating.

The new plan started with a phone call.

“Special Investigations,” said a distracted voice on the other line.

“Hi, this is Harry Dresden,” I said amicably. “I need to talk to Sergeant Murphy.”

There was a moment of static, then a click, and Murphy was greeting me quickly.

“Please tell me you’ve got something, Dresden,” she said, definitely harried, a step away from breathless.

“Not as such, no,” I wheedled, and I could almost feel her glare on the other side of the line. “But I’ve picked up some experts who can probably help if they can get a look at the bodies.”

The silence was terse. “How many experts?” Murphy asked at length.

“Uh. Three?”

“Dammit, Harry,” she hissed. “I can’t just let four civilians into the morgue.”

“I’m a paid consultant and one of them is an angel, so technically it’d only be two civilians.”

It was a long, uncomfortable silence that followed that. I fidgeted.

“Butters is on staff right now,” she said at length, quietly. “He’ll let you in. And maybe it wouldn’t be the end of the world if some cameras suffered some temporary malfunctions.”

I let out a long breath of relief. “Thanks, Murph,” I said. “You’re the best.”

“Don’t make me regret this, Dresden.”

She hung up.


	5. Chapter 5

Apparently, the Winchesters had already looked at the bodies. It was the second thing they’d done in Chicago, after finding the cheapest, tackiest motel in the area and putting on equally cheap, but not quite as tacky, suits. A couple of fake badges and suddenly they were federal agents and the bodies were a matter of “national security.”

It was clever. Murphy would hand them their asses if she knew about it, but it was clever. They came along for a second look, Castiel for a first, since he’d been asking around about me while his hunters had made the trip. Thomas had declined the invitation to come along. Had to get to work, he’d said.

An incubus that actually cared about his job. Whacky.

“This feels weird,” Dean said as he stepped out of the Impala in front of the morgue. It was meant for Sam, but I caught it as I got out of my own car where I’d parked in front of him. “Doing this legally. I just don’t feel right in morgues without a suit.”

“We’re working a case with a cop that doesn’t want to throw us in jail and you want to risk screwing that up for tradition?” Sam scowled at his brother.

“I’m just saying, tradition works,” the older Winchester replied.

“If you get yourselves arrested, I’m not helping you,” I said, beckoning them and their silent angel with a wave of my hand as I started toward the door. “I’m not risking Murphy’s wrath for you guys.”

The cameras inside suffered some temporary malfunctions. As predicted, it wasn’t the end of   
the world. 

Or maybe it was. There had been some mumbling about an apocalypse back in my apartment. 

But there always seemed to be something apocalyptic going on, I wasn’t putting much stock into it. Even if it was coming from an angel.

There were times, though, when I was surprised by how very doggedly the world continued to not be ending. The number of mean nasties out there in the dark, it was almost a miracle that little things like humans had stuck it out for as long as they had. There were a number of occasions for which I was willing to take some direct credit for that. From the sound of it, the Winchesters and their scruffy angel had played more than a small part in letting the world spin on as well.

No one would ever have guessed from his name that Waldo Butters also had a place on that illustrious list of world-savers. Meeting him in person wouldn’t exactly have convinced them otherwise, unless they had actually seen him a few years ago, keeping a zombie dinosaur moving so I could squish some necromancers. You know, the usual.

Butters was a good friend and a better man. He was also a medical examiner willing to overlook some of the less important rules ever since said rules had almost cost him his job and his sanity. So he waited while I killed the cameras with a breath and a hex and let me into the morgue with my small entourage.

“Didn’t think you were actually feds,” he said at length, examining the Winchesters. “Not nearly stiff enough. Asked too many of the right questions.”

They blinked in response.

“Next time you’re working in Chicago, impersonate members of SI. It’ll make more sense.”

They gaped. I suppressed a snort of laughter.

Butters. Smart. Even as he joked, he held himself warily at a distance from the strangers. He could tell that the four of us weren’t exactly a well-oiled machine. Probably had something to do with the fact that he’d never seen them before their stint as feds, and my friends tended to know each other. Oh, and there was also the bit where Dean kept glowering at me and Sam kept throwing me apologetic looks as we walked down the hall. Castiel just looked uncomfortable, a little confused. I got the impression that that was normal.

“Don’t encourage them,” I said, and then pointedly, “Murphy.”

That was all the warning he needed. Like I said, Butters. Smart. He led in silence, and I spent the time running my thumb along one of my rings. Even with the situation explained, I still wasn’t super keen on working with people who had grabbed me out of a parking lot with the intention of painful death. Just a little bit of lingering lizard brain paranoia, I guess. I was willing to bet good money that the older Winchester’s sour mood came from a similar place.

Or maybe he just didn’t like that I was a wizard. From as much as I’d heard over the years, hunters didn’t tend to wait and ask questions before snuffing people out. Could be that I was the first vaguely abnormal thing that he’d intentionally let live in a good long time. Except for the angel, of course.

There was definitely something weird going on there.

“Here we go,” Butters said almost brightly. We walked into the examination room where the freshest of the bodies was already out and on the cold metal table.

If I squinted, I could almost recognize his face from the picture in his file. As a general rule, driver’s license photos are ugly as sin, but there was nothing like a good drowning to make the grainy, lopsided scowl that everyone seemed to wind up with look like a glamour shot after a day at the spa. Richard Creed’s dead face was sunken and gray, and the considerable amount of fat around his chin and neck looked almost gelatinous where it had fallen on the examination table. I extended my senses beyond the barrier of my skin, sent them questing over the dead body.

It wasn’t pleasant. Corpses are never pleasant. It’s one of the laws of the universe, right up there with ‘Faeries will try to screw you in more ways than one’ and ‘traffic will always be terrible when you’re in a rush’. But there’s something particularly wrong about lives cut short by an act of violence, and that’s tripled when it’s a violence involving magic. A life unlived lingers, all that potential clouding around the body, congregating around the nose and mouth as if waiting to be breathed back in and resumed. Creed had been a middle-aged man with no family who had long since resigned himself to working in insurance, so there wasn’t much left behind. But it was still there, thready and gray, parting like cheesecloth when I waved my hand through it.

And through it all there was a sense of wetness, though pressing my finger against the dead man’s shoulder revealed bone-dry skin. Something in the aftermath of his death felt like the fine spray of water that accompanies large waves, cold and stinging and not like any magic I had ever encountered before. It was more primal, and strangely without malice, but definitely magic all the same.

Magic had killed this man. The same magic had killed two others, their bodies probably locked away in the freezers in the same room. Magic had killed so many people, wielded by the greedy or the jealous or the just plain stupid. It wasn’t something that got any easier, no matter how many times I encountered it. 

I pulled my senses back into myself and swallowed hard, my mouth dry and rough. The Winchesters had already started their own, more tangible investigation of the body, while Castiel and Butters both looked at me, intent and expectant, respectively. I blinked at the angel, who did nothing in return. He just tilted his head, ever so slightly, to the right.

Yeah. This was going to be a weird case. 

I tried to ignore him, and the muttering brothers, while I nodded tiredly at Butters. “This doesn’t make any sense,” I said, running a hand over my face. “Killing with magic takes...it takes a lot of hate. At worst, what’s left here just feels a little impatient. Mostly bored.”

“Maybe the monster’s got some anger management courses under its belt,” Dean drawled, pulling down Reed’s lower lip. “Or some really good drugs.” I scowled, but before I could say anything the elder Winchester’s face molded into one of surprise. 

“Didn’t see that before,” Sam murmured, running a gloved finger over the corpse’s teeth.

“Dude looks like someone was ready to drink a margarita out of him,” Dean said, grabbing a probe and a small dish. He scraped at Creed’s pearly whites, slowly filling the dish with white crystals that most definitely didn’t belong where they’d been found.

“Is that salt?” Sam asked, taking it from his brother and peering at it. 

“Guess we get to rule out demons,” was Dean’s reply.

“It doesn’t feel like any Faerie or vampire magic I’ve ever encountered, either,” I said, my voice hoarse. I coughed, and swallowed again, and couldn’t remember the last time I’d ever felt so damn thirsty. I brushed it aside. Probably just a side effect of the angel’s healing mojo.

“They’re ritual deaths,” Castiel said. He’d been so quiet that I’d almost forgotten that he could speak. He moved quickly, pulling up Creed’s eyelids to peer into his dead pupils, and then inhaled sharply through his nose. “Probably to break a binding,” he continued absently as he returned to peering at me. In one moment he was back in my space, staring at my eyes. I lowered them instinctively--I didn’t know if angels had anything that passed for a soul, and I didn’t care to find out by hurtling face-forward into it. I would have spoken, but my tongue seemed to be glued to the roof of my mouth.

“You might want to sit down,” he said, his voice authoritative gravel. 

I’ve never gotten on well with authority. I opened my mouth so I could tell him to shove it, but I was interrupted. I tasted salt, and I felt the distinct snap of magic closing around me. All at once, I wasn’t so thirsty anymore.

Butters and the Winchesters exploded into surprised movement while Castiel stood still, his mouth pulled into a frown. And then I was on the floor.

Drowning isn’t fun, and don’t ever let anyone tell you differently. It adds several pounds of sloshing weight to your body, and then there’s the part where it feels like your lungs have wandered off somewhere, leaving you to your own devices. I clutched at my throat, struggling for a breath that just wouldn’t come, and while I’m certain the four grown men in the room with me were doing something, I couldn’t push aside the panic that comes along with sudden apparent lunglessness to pay them any sort of real attention.

There were hands on me and pain in my chest and shouting voices. The magic crawling in my skin was cold and it roiled me around like a man who didn’t know how to swim pushed pushed into a current. It was sharp and violent and possessed of about as much feeling as the tide. 

If my vision hadn’t been starting to turn gray around the edges, I probably would have been offended by the complete lack of interest from the thing that was trying to kill me. Out of all the powerful people out there who wanted me dead, the job was going to get done by someone who didn’t care one way or the other about me? It just didn’t seem fair.

But it didn’t happen that way. There was light and a voice that shook the room with its power. It was something a step to the left of a practitioner’s will and cranked up to eleven, and it coursed over me and into my skin. Something frighteningly strong tore through something impossibly old and in an instant it was over.

I breathed, and the expansion of my lungs was a huge, desperate gasping thing. I did it again, just because I could, before rolling onto my hands and knees and coughing, spitting brine and bile onto the cold tile floor. A broad, warm hand on my shoulder brought me back to myself, and I looked up into Sam’s face, pinched with worry.

“What was that?” Butters squeaked.

I tried to stand, but wobbled halfway up and grudgingly accepted Sam’s help in easing me into a sit. I opened my mouth to tell the good doctor that I didn’t have half a clue, but he was looking to Castiel for that answer, not me.

“Something old,” he rasped. “I couldn’t determine exactly who it belonged to, but the energy was coming from Hell.”

The Winchesters stiffened visibly, and Dean swore. “So what, Lucifer’s throwing a party and all his friends are invited?” he demanded. 

Castiel shook his head. “Older. Unrelated, probably just using Lucifer’s campaign as a distraction.”

“Because we didn’t already have enough to be worrying about,” Sam muttered as he stood, brushed aside by Butters. The good doctor proceeded to poke and prod at me to make sure I wasn’t just pretending to breathe.

Probably easier for him to do something he understood while trying to process things like “Hell’s real” and “Lucifer’s around and kicking.”

“Why attack Harry, though?” he asked while checking my pulse. “The deaths were all random.”

“It was probably protecting itself,” Sam supplied.

“Galinda the Good Wizard gets a look at its mojo,” Dean continued for his brother. “It feels threatened and hits first just to be safe.”

I glowered. Castiel’s face pinched together.

“His name is Harry,” he said, “Not Galinda. Have you sustained a head injury? You should have told me.”

Dean rolled his eyes. “Never mind.”

“You can call me whatever you want as long as we get out of here,” I said around one last cough before hauling myself to my feet. I wobbled a little, but brushed off Sam’s motion to support me.

“To the Batcave, then?” Dean supplied.

I nodded. “To the Batcave.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the extended radio silence. My life has kinda been punching me in itself lately. But fear not, I have zero intentions of letting this baby fall through the cracks. You'll just have to be patient with me, and I apologize for that.  
> Fortunately, winter break is coming up, and it's a long one. I ought to be able to get a lot of writing done for you lovelies.

It was a tangible relief to be behind my wards again. One of these days I was going to have to figure out a way to make a mobile version. You know, when I had some free time. So at some point in the next century. Hopefully. We’ll see how my schedule pans out.

I didn’t see that happening any time soon, though. I wasn’t exactly on top of my obligations at the moment, a fact that was made clear by one Molly Carpenter sitting impatiently on my couch when we arrived.

Part of having an apprentice was actually, you know, training them. As frantic as things had gotten, with the deaths and the Winchesters, that ball had been well and truly dropped for the day. 

Look, nobody’s perfect. I think I can be forgiven for this one mistake.

She watched us enter cautiously, her eyes narrow with suspicion. Her expression relaxed when she saw the strangers enter without an explicit invitation, though there was still a certain patient tension in her body, a readiness to leap into action.

She did, however, offer the angel a nod of recognition. “Thanks for keeping my teacher from getting killed,” she said. “Even if he is an ass who doesn’t keep apprentices who have every reason to be very concerned informed.”

“Your father made a compelling argument,” Castiel said.

My apprentice stood, hands on her hips, and appraised the Winchesters. There was a light in her eyes that I did not like as she looked Dean up and down. I liked his responding brow quirk even less.

“Down, grasshopper,” I said, at the same time Sam barked a sharp “No” at his brother. They huffed matching sighs and slumped visibly. 

“So we’re in crisis mode?” she asked as if nothing had happened. “On-the-job training?” She sounded too excited at the prospect. Always did.

My mouth still tasted like salt, my skin was still clammy. Whatever the big bad of the week was, it had taken a potshot at me already and we knew next to nothing about what it was. There was no way in hell I was letting Molly get tangled up in this. Which just meant she’d be all the more insistent on involving herself.

Kid is way too much like me for her own good sometimes.

“We’re still not sure what the job is,” I said, scrubbing a hand over my face. “And I’d feel more comfortable if you stayed with your family.”

Her eyes narrowed, and the set of her jaw shifted into a stubborn line that I’m willing to bet she learned from Murphy. “I can take care of myself and you know it,” she said, her volume climbing half a step up. “How do you expect me to learn anything if you always send me off to be looked after by my parents?”

I held my arms out placatingly, well aware of the eyes of damn-near strangers on us. “Down,” I repeated, my voice slipping toward stern. Impressive force of will aside, Molly was my apprentice and she would listen. “Your job is not jumping to conclusions. Your job is listening to what I tell you. And until I know what the hell is going on, your job is making sure your family stays safe.”

“The Carpenters are well protected,” Castiel interjected.

“Right, the angels,” I said, vitriol staining my voice as I rounded on him. “Because they’ve done such a fantastic job of keeping them all safe lately.”

“I told you,” he began in response, before Dean elbowed him sharply into silence.

I decided to ignore the interruption like the beacon of benevolent patience I am. “Get everybody to Saint Mary’s,” I said, turning back to Molly. The anger was gone from her face, replaced by a cool, sharp focus. “Have you been practicing your shields like I told you?”

She nodded, swallowing hard.

“Good. Let’s just hope you don’t need to use them.”

 

Everyone does something different to occupy their body while they’re thinking. On the rare occasion that I had the time to do it without actively running or fighting for my life, I tended to pace. Sometimes I ate, or mixed up some familiar potions. I had no intention of sharing my lab with strangers, so I combined the first two.

Castiel sat, his back straight and board-stiff. I don’t think I even saw him blink.

Sam took stock of their weapons and started cleaning a gun, a particularly old-looking Colt with a pentagram carved into its handle. He handled it reverently, counting and recounting the bullets that belonged to it.

Dean, on the other hand, didn’t think. He yammered. I was beginning to understand why so many people found me so annoying.

“Apprentice, huh?” he asked, waggling his eyebrows. To his credit, he disassembled a sawn-off shotgun at the same time.

“It’s not uncommon,” I said flatly in response. Or I tried to. It came out a little muffled around a mouthful of beef jerky.

“So is that a strictly educational thing? Or is there a little bit of hot for teacher going on?”

I swallowed, and I fixed him with my best glare. It would have been better if I’d been able to look him in the eye, but one soulgaze a day was enough for me. “Dean Winchester,” I said, my voice hard. I didn’t use his Name, but it was close enough that he would have felt just a little shiver in the base of his spine. “I have wrought works that even the likes of you could not imagine. Do not think for a moment that I am above turning you into a toad.”

He swallowed hard, and his brother at least made an attempt to disguise his laugh. Castiel’s brow furrowed.

“That would break your own Council’s Second Law,” he said, perturbed. “Would that not forfeit your own life?”

“I might be willing to risk it,” I said, holding my gaze on Dean until he nodded.

“Right,” he said, holding his hands out. “Apprentice is off the table. Shit, man, no need to get uppity.”

“This is annoyed. You don’t want to see uppity.”

At that moment, his phone rang. It was surprising enough to dispel most of the cloud of my aggravation. He answered with a sharp “What?” and pulled the thing away from his ear to scowl at it and then me when I can assume he got nothing but static in response.

“Wards,” I said, gesturing idly with one hand to the room as a whole. “Magic doesn’t like tech. Probably thinks it’s full of itself or something. Just step outside, it’ll be fine.”

Dean frowned, but slipped outside after a brief struggle with my heavy door.

“Hell’s bells, is he always like that?” I asked.

Sam huffed a quiet laugh and set the gun down. “Pretty much,” he said, running a hand through his hair. 

“And you manage to put up with it, how exactly?”

His smile faded and turned softer. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s not easy. I’ve tried leaving before, doing the normal life thing. But Dean’s my brother. He practically raised me by himself. You know how family is.”

I’m not an expert on family. My mother died giving me life-and don’t think that that’s not something that I’ve lost many a night of sleep over. My father died when I was six. Four years later I showed a bit of magical talent and got snapped up by Justin DuMorne, who will not be winning any adoptive father of the year awards. Partly because he was an abusive bastard and partly because I killed him when I was sixteen. 

Then Ebenezar McCoy took me in. He was a good man, and he was determined to make one out of me, too. I still wonder if he succeeded, sometimes. He fixed some of the damage. And I had Thomas, even if we had to hide our shared parentage.

But the sort of family that Sam was talking about?

“No,” I said darkly, gritting my teeth together. “No, I don’t suppose I do.”

I’m not sure what compelled me to be honest. It would have been so much simpler to shrug and mutter a vague affirmative. Cleaner. And I wouldn’t have had to see the way Sam’s face just sort of...crumpled. His small smile vanished and his brows knit together and I swear it looked like he was debating whether or not to stand up and hug me. 

“I,” he stumbled over his words. “I’m sorry. I didn’t--I shouldn’t have assumed.”

I held up a hand. “Forget it. It’s not important. No need to have a moment or anything.”

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled again, and I rolled my eyes.

“If you apologize one more time, I’m getting my big stick and hitting you with it.”

That got a chuckle out of him. Point, Dresden.


End file.
